ABSTRACT
The city and its residential landscapes are not mere ‘bricks and mortar’ but spaces encoded with multiple social-political meanings and cultural significations. As Delores Hayden (2002) notes, housing form carries many aesthetic, social and economic meanings that have profound influences on the well-being of urban life and the community. Indeed, housing form not only carries with it the utilitarian function of providing the proverbial ‘roof over one’s head’ but also is complex social text laden with symbolic material culture. As Alfred Marshall (2001 [1907]: 58) remarked:
House-room satisfies the imperative need for shelter from the weather: but the need plays very little part for the effect demand for house-room . . . relatively large and well appointed house-room is, even in the lowest social ranks, at once a ‘necessary for efficiency’, and the most convenient and obvious way of advancing a material claim to social distinction. And even in those grades in which everyone has house-room sufficient for the higher activities of himself [sic] and his family, a yet further and almost unlimited increase is desired as a requisite for the exercise of many of the higher social activities.
